President Barack Obama has proposed an increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $9 per hour, a change that would primarily affect service industry workers.

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called for an increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $9 per hour. Here are arguments for and against this policy, excerpted from editorials published in other newspapers:

Raise minimum wage for workers

Little evidence exists to suggest that modest increases in the minimum wage leads to job losses, so the battle ahead in Congress is really one between free market orthodoxy and basic human decency. We would invest our money in decency. ...

Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage in the late 1960s was about $10 per hour, and it was even higher in the 1980s. President Obama's call to raise it to $9 is far from excessive. The state of Washington is already higher.

The proposed new rate translates to a little less than $19,000 a year before taxes, still below federal poverty thresholds. Even with the Earned Income Tax Credit and SNAP benefits, it's nowhere near a comfortable living.

And then there's the issue of fairness. We all took a bath in the Great Recession. Average income from 2007 to 2009 fell 17.4 percent, the largest two-year drop since the Great Depression. The wealthy took an even bigger hit - the top 1 percent in income lost more than a third of their incomes.

But things have changed. From 2009 to 2011, average real income per family grew by 1.7 percent, but most of us won't have noticed since all of that was concentrated in the top 1 percent. The rest of the country, on average, lost income. ...

Decades ago, it was conventional wisdom among economists that increases in minimum wages led to job losses. That's changed in the past 20 years, beginning the research of economist David Card, who in the early 1980s published one of the first studies to find that changes in the wage had no discernible effect on employment.

A study released just in February by the Center for Economic and Policy Research sought to explain that. It found that increases in minimum wage were generally offset by reductions in labor turnover, improvements in organizational efficiency and small price increases. ...

Working people need a raise. Congress should give them one.

- Battle Creek Enquirer

Wage hike will boost youth unemployment

One paradox of the Obama presidency is how it has retained the support of young people and minorities despite the damage its policies have done to their economic prospects. In his latest attempt to increase the minority youth jobless rate, President Obama is proposing to raise the minimum wage. ...

Setting a floor under the price of labor creates winners and losers. Some workers will get a $1.75 raise. Great. But others - typically the least educated and skilled - will be priced out of the job market and their pay won't rise to $9. It will be zero. ...

The minimum wage is also an ineffective way to reduce poverty. Most families in poverty don't have someone who works, so making it more difficult to get a job exacerbates poverty. Obama says that a "family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty level. That is wrong."

He left out that most minimum-wage earners are not the primary bread winner. Nearly 40 percent live with a parent or relative. The average family income of a household with a minimum-wage worker is about $47,023 - which is far above the poverty line of $23,550 for a family of four. ...

The damage from a minimum wage hike depends on the overall labor market. If the job market is buoyant, as it is in the fracking boomtown of Williston, N.D., fast-food workers may already make more than $9 an hour. But when the jobless rate is high, as it still is in California and New York, the increase punishes minority youth in particular.

That is what happened during the last series of wage hikes to $7.25 from $5.15 that started in July 2007 as the economy was headed toward recession. The last increase hit in July 2009 just after the recession ended, and as the nearby chart shows, the jobless rate jumped for teens and black teens especially. For black teens, the rate has remained close to 40 percent and was still 37.8 percent in January. ...

It'd be nice to think that some Republicans, even one, would make the moral case that the minimum wage hurts the poorest workers. But both Presidents Bush, 41 and 43, went along with increases and so did the Newt Gingrich Congress in 1996. Obama knows that history. Republicans may fold again to take the issue off the table in 2014, but it's a tragedy that those who will suffer the most are Obama's most ardent supporters.